Sci-Hub is a shadow library that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the rising costs of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use and reliability, as well as the enormous size of its collection. A 2018 study estimated that Sci-Hub provided access to almost all scholarly publications. On 15 July 2022, Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprised 88,343,822 files.Sci-Hub Official website: About. Retrieved 2022-07-15. In December 2020, the site paused uploads due to legal troubles. Since then, the site has archived a much lower fraction of new articles.
Sci-Hub and Elbakyan were sued twice for copyright infringement in the United States, in 2015 and 2017, and lost both cases by default, leading to loss of some of its Internet domain names. The site has cycled through different domain names since then.
Sci-Hub has been praised by some in the scientific, academic, and publishing communities for providing access to knowledge generated by the scientific community, which is usually funded by taxpayers (government grants) and with zero royalties paid to the authors. Publishers have criticized it for violating copyright, reducing the revenue of publishers, and potentially being linked to activities compromising universities' network security, though the cybersecurity threat posed by Sci-Hub may have been exaggerated by publishers.
Elbakyan questioned the morality of the publishers' business and the legality of their methods in regards to the right to science and culture under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while maintaining that Sci-Hub should be "perfectly legal". Many Sci-Hub users see Sci-Hub as a moral imperative, and believe that the law should be changed to lift any bans on Sci-Hub.
History
Sci-Hub was created by Alexandra Elbakyan, who was born in Kazakhstan in 1988. Elbakyan earned her undergraduate degree at Kazakh National Technical University studying information technology, then worked for a year for a computer security firm in Moscow, then joined a research team at the University of Freiburg in Germany in 2010 that was working on a brain–computer interface. She then became interested in transhumanism and after attending a transhumanism conference in the United States, Elbakyan spent her remaining time in the country doing a research internship at Georgia Institute of Technology.
She later returned to Kazakhstan, where she started research in a Kazakh university. According to Elbakyan, she experienced difficulty accessing scientific papers relevant to her research project. She began contributing to online forums dedicated to sharing research papers. In 2011, she developed Sci-Hub to automatically share papers. The site was launched on September 5, 2011.
In May 2021, Sci-Hub users collaborated to preserve the website's data, anticipating that the site may go offline. In September 2021, the site celebrated the tenth anniversary of its launch date by uploading on that single day over 2.3 million articles to its database.
Sci-Hub has cycled through domain names, some of which have been blocked by domain registry operators. Sci-Hub remained reachable via alternative domains such as .io, then .cc, and .bz. Sci-Hub has also been accessible at times by directly entering the IP address, or through a .onion Tor Hidden Service. It is also accessible through a Telegram bot.
In January 2026, Elbakyan announced on X that the domain sci-hub.se had been "finally" blocked through the Domain Name System, and hinted at her clash with the website's domain name registrar, the Swedish company Njalla.
In April 2026, Sci-Hub launched an experimental artificial intelligence called Sci-Bot, capable of answering questions using its vast database of pirated scientific articles. To the extent that this reduces the risk of hallucinations based on such a corpus of studies, experts assess important limitations, such as the inability to maintain consistent conversations, the lack of recent research due to the new security barriers of publishers, and a selection of references that are not always the most relevant.
Legal status
United States In 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub, in Elsevier et al. v. Sci-Hub et al., at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Library Genesis (LibGen) was also a defendant in the case, which may be based in either the Netherlands or in Russia. It was the largest copyright infringement case that had been filed in the U.S., or in the world, at the time. Elsevier alleged that Sci-Hub violated copyright law and induced others to do so, and it alleged violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as inducements to violate that law. Elsevier asked for monetary damages and an injunction to stop the sharing of the papers. Elsevier has used accusations over the alleged security threat that Sci-Hub poses to institutions to encourage educational institutions to block its use.
Elbakyan responded to the case in an interview by accusing Elsevier of violating the right to science and culture under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She later wrote a letter to the court about the case describing her reasons for creating Sci-Hub, in which she stated, "Payment of 32 dollars [for each download] is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research."
At the time the website was hosted in St. Petersburg, Russia, where judgments made by American courts were not enforceable, and Sci-Hub did not defend the lawsuit. In June 2017, the court awarded Elsevier US$15 million in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub and others in a default judgment. The judgment found that Sci-Hub used accounts of students and academic institutions to access articles through Elsevier's platform ScienceDirect. The judgment also granted the injunction, which led to the loss of the original sci-hub.org domain.
In June 2017, the American Chemical Society (ACS) filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging copyright and trademark infringement; it sought judgment US$4.8 million from Sci-Hub in damages, and Internet service provider blocking of the Sci-Hub website. On 6 November 2017, the ACS was granted a default judgment, and a permanent injunction was granted against all parties in active concert or participation with Sci-Hub that has notice of the injunction, "including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries", to cease facilitating access to the service. On 23 November 2017, four Sci-Hub domains had been rendered inactive by the court order and its CloudFlare account was terminated.
Since 2018, the White House Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has cited Sci-Hub as one of the most flagrant "notorious market" sites in the world.
On 8 January 2021, Twitter suspended Sci-Hub's account citing "counterfeit content" as the reason. In response to a lawsuit in India, as well as to Elbakyan's claim that the FBI had requested data from her Apple account, Reddit users on the subreddit r/DataHoarder organized to download and seed backups of the articles on Sci-Hub, with the intention of creating a decentralized and uncensorable version of the site.
Sweden In October 2018, Swedish ISPs were forced to block access to Sci-Hub after a court case brought by Elsevier; Bahnhof, a large Swedish ISP, in return soft-blocked the Elsevier website. On 26 January 2023, the Sci-Hub .se domain name was reported to have been taken down, but the domain name was reinstated within a week after successful "ownership verification".
Russia In November 2018, Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media blocked Sci-Hub and its mirror websites after a Moscow City Court ruling to comply with Elsevier's and Springer Nature's complaints regarding intellectual property infringement. The site moved to another domain and is still available online as of 22 January 2022. Despite Elsevier, Springer Nature, and the American Chemical Society, among other publishers, pulling out of Russia in March 2022 as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sci-Hub remains blocked in Russia.
France
On 7 March 2019, following a complaint by Elsevier and Springer Nature, a French court ordered French ISPs to block access to Sci-Hub and Library Genesis. However, the court order did not affect the academic network Renater, through which most French academic access to Sci-Hub presumably goes.
Belgium Following the lawsuit by Elsevier in March 2019 in France, Elsevier, Springer, John Wiley, and Cambridge University Press filed a complaint against Proximus, VOO, Brutélé, and Telenet to block access to Sci-Hub and LibGen. The publishers claimed to represent more than half of the scientific publishing sector and indicated that over 90% of the contents on the sites infringed copyright laws; they won the lawsuit. Since then, the two sites have been blocked by those ISPs; visitors are redirected to a stop page by Belgian Federal Police instead, citing illegality of the site's content under Belgian legislation.
The European Commission included Sci-Hub in its "Piracy Watch List".
India
Sci-hub was affected by its first blocking order in India in May 2012 which it had since continued to evade through proxy sites, however, with introduction of dynamic injunctions for rapidly blocking proxy sites coming into effect in April 2019, Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society filed a copyright infringement lawsuit case against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis in the Delhi High Court seeking dynamic injunction against the sites, in December 2020. This meant that any future domain name, IP address, or name-change by the respondents will not require the plaintiffs to return to court for an additional injunction.
Since India's copyright laws allow for educational exemption for distribution of copyrighted material by teachers and students, which it had also upheld in a landmark case against a Delhi university affiliated photocopy shop in 2016, Sci-hub's defense argued for fair dealing exception under the law. The court issued preliminary injunction on Sci-Hub in 24 December 2020, restricting the sites from uploading, publishing, or making any article available until the next hearing which Sci-hub complied. In the case, Sci-hub was being represented by Advocate Nilesh Jain.
The High Court agreed on 6 January 2021 to wait before passing any interim order in the case until they hear representations from scientists, researchers, and students. A number of Indian academics offered support to Sci-Hub after the lawsuit was filed. In September, Sci-hub uploaded a batch release celebrating its 10 year anniversary since the injunction restricting the site from uploading content had expired, however the term of the injunction was extended following the release which Sci-hub claimed to have complied with. In 2022, Elbakyan and her supporters unsuccessfully pursued another line of defence that the journal publishers did not pay to the authors for copyright transfer, as Indian copyright law requires, and therefore the publishers did not own the copyrights on these articles.